1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to computing environments. More particularly, the invention is directed to a system and method for providing integrated customer care, managing complex data relating to Point-Of-Sale (POS) activity.
2. Background Art
An integral part of any organization is the customer service. Managing the initial point-of-sale or quick counter sale is critical, therefore the customer service representative must have access to all information necessary to close the sale. In addition, long after the initial sale, an organization must be able to keep its customers satisfied otherwise someone else will successfully lure away the customer. Therefore, maintaining and managing data related to tracking and accounting of the sales is important. In addition to maintaining and managing the data must also be accessible. Generally, the nature of a business dictates the level of interaction with customers. Service industries must deal with their customers on a more regular basis than manufacturers or other industry sectors. The energy and telecommunications industries are examples of such service industries. Critical to today's competitive environment is information. Whether it is responding to a consumer's request, taking a customer's order, analyzing pricing changes, billing, tracking invoices or researching historical sales, a system is needed to provide detailed information that is needed for accurate and responsive decision making.
Energy and telecommunications industries are representative examples because every home or business utilizes one or more forms of energy or telecommunication services. As such, industries that provide these services tend to have a very large customer base, and have to handle a vast number of customer contacts in the form of telephone inquiries, point of sale contact and other electronic communiqué. As a result, a vast amount of data is guaranteed relating to orders, invoices, billings, and inventories. What this means is that in addition to the periodic desire of those customers to make alterations to their services, there are also the ongoing interactions with the customers that involve purchasing vertical product lines, customer orders, billing questions, payment arrangements, service interruptions, equipment malfunction and so on. Customer service representatives (CSRs) have to cope with all of the very diverse needs of the customers.
The energy and telecommunication industries are particularly plagued by varying aspects of customer service point-of-sale and billing maintenance including traditional customer service issues, customer orders, returns, miscellaneous credits, write-offs, billing related issues, service agreement issues, and government regulation issues. Traditionally, system and business paradigms for addressing these customer service maintenance issues have been focused at the individual account, or what is also termed the agreement level within this discussion. For example, a home with two telephone lines, electric service and gas service would be considered to have 4 separate agreements each of which pertain to the separate services. Traditional systems do not support multiple accounts receivable GL accounts per order and/or invoice, do not support divisionalized accounting, and do not support a point-of-sale interface.
As previously mentioned, customer service has traditionally been focused at the agreement or service level. By focusing customer service at the agreement level, it makes it extremely difficult if not impossible in some instances to pool or access consolidated information relating to a customer. For example, a telephone company records bills and accesses information by telephone number or location and not necessarily by customer. Similarly, an electric company accesses information by the physical location where the service is provided. In areas of the country where a single energy company, telecommunications company or cooperative provides multiple services, it is increasingly more difficult to get a handle on the entire position of a customer. It is very painstaking for a CSR to see the ‘full picture’ about a customer if the CSR must access agreements individually.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a collaborative and comprehensive solution that integrates all aspects of customer care, addresses consumer and subscriber billing, accounting, operations, product purchase, engineering and equipment, in order to enable a CSR to quickly and efficiently address customer needs. This is particularly more paramount because the success of any of these service-based businesses is heavily intertwined with its customer's perspective and the level of service that such customer receives.
Servicing a customer is another major challenge to a myriad of businesses. The objective is usually to provide quick, accessible and competent responses and solutions to the customer. To this end, in the utility or telecommunications industries, it is necessary to be able to quickly ascertain all of the facts and information pertaining to an individual customer or organization in order to fulfill work orders or service orders.
Prior art systems that have attempted to address these issues have primarily consisted of solitary solutions to specific areas of concern. In other words, these prior art solutions have typically created ‘islands of automation’. For each island, certain functions are highly computerized and provide a solution, albeit a narrowly focused solution. However, this leads to problems of integration. The lack of interplay between the various systems requires that CSRs have to become conversant with multiple systems or rely on someone else to complete a task that relates to the customer with whom the CSR is communicating. From the organization's standpoint, there are usually a number of proprietary business tools from a multitude of manufacturers. Also many of the solutions historically have been character based, which provides a user interface that is not user friendly. Some graphical based systems have been implemented but are not customer centric and are not integrated and do not provide comprehensive support for multiple accounts receivable GL accounts per order and/or invoice or for divisional line of business accounting.
Business tools from different manufacturers are often not compatible with each other. This results in integration, redundancy and implementation problems. In addition, there are the licensing and/or development costs associated with obtaining the tools as well as the maintenance costs, which could be quite prohibitive to some companies. The above problems are particularly prevalent with information technology solutions relating to point-of-sale and accounts receivable customer care systems.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved customer care system that addresses the shortcomings described above. A fully integrated customer care system that provides a common interface to legacy system and facilitates access to customer information with a paradigm that is aptly suited and logical for traversing through the system is needed. A CSR should be able to access customer centric information, track customer contact, and manage point-of-sale relating to any jobs or service orders that arise from a customer contact.